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Skinning Headway; The Future of Theme Design
The new breed of framework themes such as Headway and Thesis are going to change the way new WordPress themes are designed.
In this post I want to tell you why I think this is and how it will effect your theme purchasing or theme development habits in the future.
Most of my experience is with Headway, so I will concentrate on this theme, but I am sure Thesis has the same functionality, please feel free to comment all Thesis fans.
So What’s The Buzz With The Framework Themes?
Framework theme is the name I give to the new breed of themes which allow a designer to skin with their own look and feel whilst using the underlying code to provide the functionality they want without a complete redesign and new theme development.
You cannot fail to have missed the buzz about Headway or Thesis in the Blogosphere and on Twitter, people are all saying which is the best and how fabulous both products are. In truth both are excellent themes, they allow people without any CSS or coding skills to develop a highly personalised blog look and feel.
An example of this can be seen from the following sites, which are all built around the headway theme, but look very different.
They are all the same base theme, but they have been designed to the owmers specification, and they are all very different.
Why I think This Will Chaneg the Future of Theme Design
The functionality I really want to talk about, is the ability for people to Skin the Headway theme and then to pass the skin onto another person using Headway theme and to completely change the look and feel of the base HEadway appearance. In the examples above, these are custom configuration jobs, but their modifications could be put into a skin and easily re-distributed.
How A Skin Works
A skin is a set of custom style sheets, images and function code which can be packaged up and installed very easily into an existing Headway config. These sets of files will be developed by traditional web designers, packaged up and installed into a Headway install, from the skin configuration options in headway select that skin and a whole new custom look and feel will be given to headway.
Where Designers Come In
In the future a designer will create a skin for Headway (or thesis I am sure it’s the same from their camp) rather than developing a theme from the ground up.
How do I know this is happening? I asked. I put a query out on twitter and several design companies came back and confirmed my suspicion that this was their way forward. One designer was quite sad about this as it took a lot of the challenging (read fun for a geek) work away from the whole theme development process.
I think the role of a web designer will be to think about design rather than underlying code and functiuonality.
Do I think this is a good thing? Yes I do, there are going to be some pretty fantastic looking sites coming out if all of the time is spent on the presentation of a site rather than the gadgets which power a site.
I Still don’t get Why It Is So Radical
Most of the hard work is already done by Headway. All a designer needs to do is create their look and feel, do the designing, logo creation, wizzy look and feel effects, style the widgets and gee-gaws. Thrust them into a headway theme skin and send it off to their client.
Development time is hugely reduced, quality is the same, theme designers can earn the same cash for less time investment, or they can reduce their costs to make custom themes much more accessible to bloggers.
Premium skins rather than themes
It is my opinion that people will be asking for custom or premium skins in the future rather than a whole new premium or custom themes.
As a client you will go to your designer and say “My framework of preference is Headway, I have spent time learning how to use the back-end functionality of my theme but I want a custom look, create me a skin please”
As a designer you will spend you time building premium skins and selling them to existing Headway customers, or developing your own premium skin shop where you develop mulitple skins and sell them many times using the same model as premium themes.
What Is This Skin Market Worth
I have been thinking about this a lot, if you have already forked out $87 dollars for your basic Headway theme, you are not going to want to spend premium theme money on a skin. I can see skins being sold for $50 – $80 as a premium skin or $400-$500 dollars for a custom skin. Much less than a premium or complete custom designed theme.
This reduction in cost will come from efficiencies in development time.
How Must Will it Cost A Designer To Get Into This Market?
For a web designer to get into this market they will need to buy a Headway developers license. At $164 the barrier for entry into this new market is very low, your first skinning gig will probably pay for your investment. Add onto this, the fact that dev. license holders can provide their clients with a copy of the Headway free of charge means their is no initial theme investement for their clients.
Here is what the Headway team say about their dev license:
If you are a developer or need/want to install Headway on multiple websites, the Headway Developer Option is for you. The Headway Developer Option allows you to install Headway on any number of websites that you or your company operates or developed. You are also allowed to remove the footer attribution/credit with the developer option (woot!).
UPDATE: I missed something in the small print you need to buy an add-on license for each client site you develop at the cost of $40 per site, here is the small print, thanks to James NomadRip for the heads up
Install on unlimited websites that you or your company owns. If you develop client sites on Headway you must pay [or have your client pay you] an additional $40 per add-on license.
Will There Be A Skin MarketPlace?
I was pondering on whether there would be a central place to sell skins using the same business model as ThemeForest.net , a market place for premium themes.
I have been in twitter/email communication with Grant Griffiths one of the people behind Headway. I was keen to see if there would be and official Headway sanctioned skin marketplace.
His answer was that a couple of domains have been purchased for a Headway Skin marketplace. He is hoping to build a community of web designers who would market their skin designs from there.
I can only see this as a bright future for people wanting to develop skins for Headway.
All Aboard
The skinning express is about to leave, get your development license now, get your skills up to speed and be part of this new theme design revolution.
I don’t plan to do any more bespoke development, all future sites for me and my clients will be skinned via Headway.
Get A Copy Of Headway Developers License
Want To Learn How To Create A Skin?
I am in the process of creating a video tutorial course to show you how to create your very own headway skin, please leave your email details and I will notify you when the course is ready. This is a premium course and will cost in the region of $147
My Skin Site
With the release of Headway 1.6, Skins have taken a massive leap forward, I have joined forced with talented designer Jonathan Woodward to start creating some exciting new Headway skins, check out our Headway Skin Site
PremiumHeadwaySkins.com
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“For a web designer to get into this market they will need to buy a Headway developers license. At $164 the barrier for entry into this new market is very low”
A problem with many of the skins developed off these frameworks is that they just don’t look very good. The Headway site itself looks great (not sure if it is using the Headway theme though) but the other 3 links you posted look very amateurish.
If you want to play around with frameworks, a better option may well be the free Thematic, Whiteboard, Carrington, WP-Framework, or Hybrid frameworks. Why pay for Headway or Thematic?
[Reply]
Danny Brown Reply:
September 10th, 2009 at 12:08 am
Hey there Doug,
Thanks for the critique on my blog design, appreciate it. As a non-coder, I don’t have CSS skills or HTML skills so the fact I can get any kind of design out means Headway works very well for me.
It’s a shame you didn’t leave a URL for your own blog, it would have been good to see how a designer (which I’m guessing you are) would make things differently.
The Headway site itself runs off Headway. And I messed about with my charity site:
http://12for12k.org
As well as a mock-up for a client:
http://maritz.dannybrown.me
Again, no coding. So, amateurish is down to the eye of the beholder obviously. But I think the fact that none of it needed coding is a pretty strong endorsement of the Hwadway theme.
As for the ones you mentioned, I’ve tried a few of them and found them very limited. But then like I said, I’m not a coder…
[Reply]
Neil Matthews Reply:
September 10th, 2009 at 10:34 am
Danny
I think you hit the nail on the head, Headway requires no coding,
Doug I think it’s a bit harsh to say the sites are ameaturish, these three people are very prominent people in their niches, so it goes to show that content is still king and design is a Royal flunky.
I like to think of a theme as the fancy clothes you wear to the night club, and your content are your seduction techniques, it;s not yoru fancy shirt which is going to bring your potential partner back to your place
[Reply]
Oh, and here’s a link to a Smashing Magazine article highlighting the free frameworks I mentioned with some links to child themes created for them. I’m partial to designing for Thematic. I find it the easiest to work with.
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/05/27/wordpress-theme-development-frameworks/
Thesis, IMO, is overrated.
[Reply]
I couldn’t agree more! In fact, I recently blogged that I think Premium Themes are dead. Frameworks and skins are the future of WordPress evolution.
[Reply]
I could be misunderstanding this, but you might want to look at this further. If you develop sites for clients, you have to still pay $40 for each new install. You can only use it on unlimited sites you own.
Thesis has similar wording and requirements, but this is taken from your Headway link on the developer option:
What Can I Do?
* Use for commercial purposes.
* Install on unlimited websites that you or your company owns. If you develop client sites on Headway you must pay [or have your client pay you] an additional $40 per add-on license.
* Remove the footer credit.
[Reply]
Neil Matthews Reply:
September 10th, 2009 at 10:24 am
Hi James,
Just rechecked the license and you are dead right, you need to pay $40 per client site you develop.
I will update the post acordingly, thanks for the heads up
Neil
[Reply]
Danny Brown Reply:
September 10th, 2009 at 11:56 pm
Watch this space…
[Reply]
I’m not sure I agree with you about your $300 skin design price. Frameworks are just empty shells. They need custom code to do anything more than just function like basic blogs and designing skins takes just as long as designing from scratch because you have to reset so many things.
More likely I think Thesis/Headway customizations will run between $600 and $1000 depending on functionality and complexity of design.
[Reply]
Neil Matthews Reply:
September 10th, 2009 at 7:11 pm
Hi Dave,
What I have missed out is any mention of the Headway leaf system. This gives you a huge amount of functionality with out the need to write any code. Headway is not just a framework, it is so much more.
I’ll expand on that in the coming weeks I think in future posts.
Dave is a cool web designer if anyone needs some design service, check out his site http://www.thinkdave.com/
[Reply]
Sorry if I offended you, Danny. Your site certainly isn’t bad. It just looks like every other basic site created with one of these “all-in-one” themes. I’ve just seen too many of these frameworks coming out that supposedly help non-designers create great looking websites without knowing how to code. In reality you still have to know how to code and have some design sense to make a decent looking website. Frameworks just give you a place to start, providing the structure. Themes like Headway help non-coders move things around and lay out their site without much technical skill, but the sites still looks pretty basic IMO. If you don’t have the skills to code yourself, or the money to hire a designer, I’d suggest purchasing a theme off Themeforest for $20-30. And no, I don’t sell on Themeforest or have any connection to them. They just have a lot of good designers creating a lot of well coded themes for a reasonable price.
[Reply]
Danny Brown Reply:
September 14th, 2009 at 3:27 pm
Hi Doug,
Thanks for jumping back in, appreciate the apology
I’ve actually used Theme Forest before, and while there are some great designs there, there’s nothing that can give me the flexibility that Headway does.
My blog was redesigned from Thesis in around 6 hours. A coder that did my Thesis design took much longer (think it was around a week) to get all the hooks, etc, in place, and there’s no way I could have done that.
When you start messing with the Headway set-up, you can see how powerful it is for both non-coders and coders. As I get more used to the layout and basic CSS (which the forums and Clay, the developer, are awesome at for supporting), I know how different my site will look. Even without CSS, though, having seen what’s on the horizon very soon for Headway, I’m pretty confident it’s a game changer.
[Reply]
Ben Cook Reply:
September 14th, 2009 at 4:10 pm
Doug,
I find that a lot of times people saying things like this haven’t actually tried using the themes/frameworks in question.
Have you actually worked with Thesis and/or Headway?
Having worked with them both, they offer a LOT more flexibility, not just for non-coders but coders as well.
The point isn’t that a non-coder can replicate 100% of what a coder could, the point is that they can do a LOT more than they’d normally be able to do.
The same goes for coders. Thesis specifically (I’ve only designed one site with Headway) makes many tasks much easier than they would have been otherwise.
[Reply]
Thanks for the thumbs up Neil. Much appreciated.
[Reply]
Wow, I’m really glad that I found this post – as I totally missed the $40 surcharge for using on client sites!
I love the concept of Headway’s Visual Editor – and I’ve looked at framework themes, but none have come close to do what Headway can.
I’m not looking for a non-coder solution, I’m looking for a fast simple means of visual design.
[Reply]
Danny Brown Reply:
March 3rd, 2010 at 2:24 am
Headway have announced that developer licenses allow you to use the theme on as many sites as you want, whether they’re your own or client ones you develop on
[Reply]
Neil Matthews Reply:
March 3rd, 2010 at 11:50 am
Good idea, I never thought that $40s per client site was a good idea.
[Reply]
Brad Parler Reply:
March 3rd, 2010 at 3:42 pm
Where are the details of this? After posting this and a quick exchange with Clay via twitter I went ahead and purchased the $164 Developer Edition of the theme – but I’ve not heard of anything else.
[Reply]
Neil Matthews Reply:
March 3rd, 2010 at 3:47 pm
Danny, can you help?
I have the developer license for Headway and I’ve just installed the beta of Headway 1.6. A lot of the questions on this post (and comments) are answered by this update – I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised
[Reply]
Neil Matthews Reply:
February 3rd, 2010 at 6:12 pm
Must speak to that Griffiths chap to see if I can snag a copy of the beta too
[Reply]
Hello all. I’ve uploaded the Headway 1.6 theme to one of my sites and I’m wondering how to import a style to my site? What type of file is this?
You can tell that I have no coding and very little design background. That’s one of the reasons I purchased Headway in the first place. I love the idea of having skins that I can import to a site to give the framework for the a site that you are looking for.
Can anyone tell me if there are any predesigned styles or skins that are available now? What exactly is the difference between a style and a skin anyway.
Thanks for your patience with a noob.
Austin
[Reply]
Neil Matthews Reply:
March 29th, 2010 at 10:41 am
Hi Austin,
If you check out this thread it may help, the documentation is under development for skins and importing styles, but there is some information in the support forum. http://headwaythemes.com/members/support/showthread.php?t=3237
With regards to predesined skins, I am currently developing a couple with a very talented designer Jonathan Woodward. At the bottom of this post is an email signup leave you details and I will contact you once they are available
[Reply]
Great Post! I have just purchased Headway after iBuilder and Thesis. I have a coding background but not in PHP or CSS and found Thesis still had a steep curve compared to Headway. I am vey interested in learning more PHP and CSS by learning how to skin Headway. So please keep in touch as I will definately subscribe to your tutorial. Rik
[Reply]